Julie Gaillard

Julie Gaillard holds a PhD in French from Emory University (2016). She has taught French language and literature at Emory University and Morehouse College and was an associated fellow at the International Research Training Group InterArt Studies (Freie Universität Berlin, 2013-15). Her dissertation, titled ‘Réalités pseudonymes: Lyotard, Beckett, Levé, Cojo, Invader’, focused on proper names in order to analyze how a variety of media (‘new’, ‘old’, and ‘mixed’) articulate our experience of ‘reality’.

She co-edited the volume Traversals of Affect: On Jean-François Lyotard (with Claire Nouvet and Mark Stoholski, Bloomsbury, 2016). Her current research continues her investigation of Lyotard’s work and its import at the crossroads of philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, arts, and politics.

Rooted in Jean-François Lyotard’s framing of the unconscious affect after Freud’s belatedness (Nachträglichkeit), this project asks how the errant, ‘inhuman’ (not-yet-human) temporality of affect has the power to disrupt systemic temporal organizations. It mobilizes diverse fields (philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, art) to sound the potential of this aberrant temporality as a mode of resistance against ‘inhuman’ (post-human) imperatives to ‘gain time’.

The project engages with Lyotard’s reading of Freud and its implications when confronted with (1) individual experiences of time as continuous; (2) social organizations of history founded on metanarratives (myth) and oriented towards goals (values); (3) the global organization of exchange that indexes the present on the future. Theory is confronted with case studies taken from literature (Proust on anamnesis and involuntary memory), art (Anselm Kiefer on foundational myths), and politics (events of terror and responses of mythical national unity).